Oxford City Council is struggling with budget cuts, a housing crisis, traffic chaos and one of the biggest rich–poor divides in the country. A local resident suggests that some funds might be diverted to DNA testing of dog poo, in order to track those owners who don’t scoop the poop.
At breakfast time I go to sit with Jakob while his mum takes his older brother to the school bus stop. In the 10 minutes she is gone I learn about the difference between Greek and Roman shields, see what their helmets looked like, and have an archery demonstration.
The 13-page GP registration forms for the Ukrainian family who have fled here across Moldova, Hungary, Slovenia, Italy and France ask how many hours during the last week they spent jogging, playing tennis, walking for pleasure and gardening.
A friend sends me a photo of a new bench outside a hotel in Oxford that thinks a lot of itself. The bench, one of a series commemorating famous Oxford names, has a plaque in memory of J.R.R. Tolkein. Some relation to J.R.R. Tolkien perhaps?
Some potato plants are coming up on our allotment, where a few got missed when we dug them last summer. We dig them up, cut off the sprouts and holey bits, and I make them into oven chips. To buy the equivalent quantity of potatoes from Waitrose costs 29 p.
Superman was a foundling, sent to Earth in a rocket by his parents, just before the planet Krypton was destroyed. Spider-Man was an orphan. Batman saw his parents murdered by a mugger in an alleyway and made a secret pledge to spend the rest of his life ‘warring on all criminals’.
It’s not just comic-book heroes. James Bond was fostered. Harry Potter was an orphan, as were Dick Whittington, Princess Leia, Paddington and Becky Sharp. Jane Eyre, Yuri Zhivago, Scarlett O’Hara…I could go on. But it is the comic-strip heroes on which Superheroes, Orphans and Origins, a new exhibition at the Foundling Museum, focuses.
The Foundling Hospital, in Brunswick Square, was famously set up by Thomas Coram in 1739, after 17 years of campaigning and with support from many people, including William Hogarth and G. F. Handel. The hospital took in babies whose parents were too poor or sick to care for them, as well as those whose mothers had been abandoned when pregnant. As London grew, and Brunswick Square was no longer on its outskirts, the hospital was moved to sites outside the city, including Redhill and Berkhamsted. The museum, in a 1930s building on the site of the original hospital, opened in 2004. Its mission is to tell the story of the Foundling Hospital, to support looked-after and care-experienced young people, and ‘to inspire change through the power of the arts’.
The current exhibition looks not only at the superheroes of Marvel and DC comics, but also at more contemporary graphic novels and comic strips, including the story of Nubia, Wonder Woman’s black half-sister, as drawn by young Jamaican artist Robyn Smith, and Street Angel, a skate-boarding, kung-fu fighting 12-year old girl, orphaned and homeless, who fights for ‘the poor, the forgotten, and the mistreated’.
I did not expect that an exhibition of comics would be so moving. The introduction to the show points out that ‘The loss of a parent brings challenges that even superheroes cannot easily overcome’ and suggests that the stories of the orphaned comic-strip heroes can ‘help us begin to understand the loneliness, anxiety and strength of character that lies at the heart of many care-experienced people’s lives’. Lemn Sissay, a writer who spent his childhood in care and is now a trustee of the Foundling Museum, says of Superman:
Notice how, as an adult, he does everything to hide his past. Notice how he secretly feels like two people. Notice how he avoids telling people the truth about his past. And notice how difficult he finds relationships.
My interest in this is not academic. My twin nieces were adopted by my sister and her husband when they were almost two. They too have been to see this show, and they seem to identify with many of the issues it raises. For us, as a family, the girls have been a joy. But for them, navigating the world and their own emotions has never been easy. As pre-teens, those existential questions we all struggle with in adolescence — the agonies of identity, self worth, body image — are for them overwhelming. None of this is helped by their experiences in care before they were adopted, which can at best be described as heartless and inadequate.
One of the artists included in the superheroes show is Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom, who recounts her experience as a Korean child adopted by Swedish parents in her graphic novel Palimpsest. She was brought up with the message that her origins did not matter — what was important was that she was loved and wanted now. This denial of her heritage and her first family, along with her feelings of strangeness and the experience of growing up in a community where everyone looked alike except her, has left Lisa Wool-Rim full of grief and anger. She now campaigns for adoptee rights.
Her story made me think hard about my nieces. Things I have said to them about family and belonging. The way they don’t want to talk about their past or about their striking looks. The fact that somewhere they have siblings, grandparents, parents they do not know. And how, whatever my own empathy and learning, I cannot imagine what it is like to be them.
The permanent exhibit in the Foundling Museum includes a video in which adults who grew up in the hospital in the 1930s recount their experiences of that time. These are not happy. Stories of being forced to eat food that made them actually vomit, sleeping in regimented dormitories in which not a single personal possession was allowed, being taught by older pupils while their teachers played snooker in the staff quarters. After the war a new head teacher was appointed and with him came some humanity. One interviewee recalls that they now had teachers who were kind and caring, and would even give you a hug. ‘I’d never been touched before’, she says.
Superman’s experience of care was not so great either. The staff in the ‘asylum’ where he was taken were appalled by his superpowers, which they saw as destructive, and only too happy to hand him over to his adoptive parents, Martha and John Kent. The Kents, in contrast, showed the super-baby and boy endless love and care. They helped Clark to understand his powers, made his Superman outfit from the surviving remnants of his space capsule, supported him in finding his way in the world and encouraged him to use his powers as a force for good.
Even I am tired of people asking of my nieces ‘aren’t they ok now?’, as if the loss of your parents and a brutal start to life were things you ever ‘get over.’ For them and for my sister, navigating the teenage years seems in itself to require superhuman resilience. I don’t know how it will turn out. But in a recent conversation about our own parents, and the way in which they continually found fault with us, compared us unfavourably to the offspring of their friends, brought us down when we were happy or excited, my sister said, ‘I am never vindictive like that with my children. I think they are wonderful.’ From where I’m standing, she is pretty amazing too.
The exhibition Superheroes, Orphans and Origins: 125 years in Comics is showing at the Foundling Museum, London, until 28 August 2022. https://foundlingmuseum.org.uk/event/superheroes-orphans-origins/
At the end of Elizabeth Strout’s most recent novel, Oh William!, the narrator, Lucy Barton, reveals what she has learnt, has come to realise, after 63 years of life. It is that ‘we don’t know anybody, not even ourselves.’ ‘This’, she says, ‘may be the only thing in the world I know to be true.’
What a joy this is to me, at a time in which I increasingly want to hide — from all the lifestyle advice, wellness gibberish, patronising podcasts — all the glib assuredness that comes at me through that portal on the world, the hand-held device. Even as a young woman I had little certainty about anything, but back then I thought it was because there was something wrong with me. Now I know that even the truths I thought I knew then were too simplistic. When I was a biology student we once had a visiting lecturer who told us that almost everything we had learnt in the last three years was mere supposition and probably wrong. I found this strangely reassuring.
In Oh William! Strout, who is herself well into her sixties, creates a narrative that shows how our childhood experiences shape our whole lives, how little we know about our parents as people, or about that foggy distance that is their past and which we realise, after they are dead, is now totally impenetrable to us. And how little we comprehend even the pattern of our own lives. Could we have done things differently, caused less hurt, been less self-absorbed, more aware? Towards the end of the book William asks Lucy (who was once married to him) ‘How many times does a person really choose something?…Once every so often — at the most — I think someone actually chooses something. Otherwise we’re following something — we don’t even know what it is but we follow it.’ This idea is at the heart of the novel.
We look back at our mistakes, the messiness of our lives, the opportunities we failed to take, the ghastly relationship disasters, and maybe we beat ourselves up a bit about this — we certainly judge our parents for the things they got wrong — and yet…we took whatever path we could at the time. All that advice we are given about five-year career plans, lifestyle changes, how different we will be if we declutter our homes, take up running, give up dairy — aren’t they just illusions of control in a chaotic world?
When my nieces write English essays at school they have to show that they have made a detailed plan, that they know what they are going to say. (And then, my sister says, they have to put in all those things that drive you mad — scatterings of adverbs, pointless adjectives, sentences that start with a subclause.) This planning is something I have never been able to do, in life as much as in writing. Even at university, my ‘essay plans’ were nothing more than a vague structure in my head. Mostly, I have to write to find out what is going to emerge. It’s a way of working out what I feel, what I think, what the questions even are. Increasingly I understand that everything is fluid, there are no fixed points, much as we would like there to be. Surely the last two years have shown us that, if nothing else.
This fluidity is hard to accept. We create the rules, the facts, the complex plans to make ourselves feel safe. I find it endlessly comforting to see two pints of milk sitting on my doorstep on a Tuesday morning, as if this simple domestic ritual, something from my childhood, can stave off mortality, climate emergency, man’s inhumanity to man. We fill our lives with such rituals, and with distractions, addictions — work, booze, doughnuts.
During all the months of lockdown I longed for certain experiences, structures, we had lost. I wanted to hear live music, sit in the cinema, have a coffee with a friend, cycle to the gym. Now, all of these are part of my life again. And yet it still feels as though there is something missing. What is it? That sense of safety we thought we would feel, when Covid was ‘over’? Now we understand that there is no end to it, no moment when we all go out and have street parties to celebrate its defeat. And there are other, worse things to worry about.
My pre-Covid life has vanished, and the changes have nothing to do with a virus from Wuhan. They are the losses (and gains) that come with age, with time. I’m not alone in this of course, it’s happening to my friends as well. Retirement (or the inability to afford it), bereavement, family rifts that would once have been unthinkable. Events that were not in our five-year plans. No wonder then that I try to make sense of what life can be now by reading the writing of women my age. When she was around 60 Simone de Beauvoir wrote something about trying to avoid turning in upon ourselves in old age, by continuing to pursue the ends that give our existence meaning, be these creative, intellectual, social or political causes. Our lives still have value for as long as we value the lives of others with ‘love, friendship, indignation, compassion’. That’s good enough for me.
‘All our textbooks now have to go for a language sensitivity check,’ says a former colleague. ‘They come back with suggestions like changing “smokers” to “people who smoke” to avoid stigmatisation. Last week I had a comment that it might be inappropriate to use the word “blacksmith”.’
Liam is doing his reading practice.
’But why doesn’t the stork just ask for a tall glass?’
’Because he wants to play a trick on the fox.’
’Why does he have to play a trick?’
‘Well, without the trick there would be no story.’
’Why does there have to be a story?’
An email comes round from the council stating that anyone who has ’children’s play equipment’ on their allotments is in breach of health and safety regs. In the furious WhatsApp thread that ensues someone writes ’I’d be interested to see the stats on Wendy-house related injuries’.
janebuekett 